The question hit jailed triple-murderer Darrel Harris like the lethal injection that may await John Taylor, the convicted mastermind of the Wendy’s massacre.

The city correction-officer-turned-killer slumped back in his chair, clutched the edge of the visiting-room table and tilted his head back.

For three solid and silent minutes, he mulled the question as if he were reliving the pain he inflicted on the two men he shot dead and the woman he fatally stabbed with an ice pick during a botched robbery inside a Brooklyn nightclub.

“You just shut down,” said Harris, the first person to face the death penalty since capital punishment was reinstated in New York state in 1995. “You think things are not real.”

“You go back to your cell, sit there and think everything is going wrong, everything is wrong,” said Harris, 44, who squirmed in the hard plastic visiting-room chair in the Clinton Correctional Facility near the Canadian border.

It was obvious Harris felt uncomfortable thinking about the experience of his 1998 death-penalty trial, saying, “You caught me off-guard.”

He didn’t proclaim his innocence. He didn’t apologize or explain. He spent most of the 20-minute meeting agonizing over the simple questions about his mindset during a trial.

Harris had sat stone-faced during his trial, in which a jury found him guilty of walking into Club Happiness in Bedford-Stuyvesant, announcing a robbery, shooting three patrons – two fatally – and stabbing Evelyn Davis, a mother of five.

In July 1998, the jury sentenced him to death – despite pleas from his mother, sister and the correction officer whom Harris saved during a 1986 riot at the Brooklyn Correctional Facility.

The jury’s verdict was overturned on a technicality this summer by the state Court of Appeals.

The family of John Taylor, who was convicted of killing five in the basement of a Wendy’s in Queens, has made similar heartfelt pleas, because in a few days, a jury will decide if he should die.

Harris escaped capital punishment, yet his eyes show the indisputable evidence that he imposed a torturous psychological death sentence on himself.